The Warrior Queen

The final installment of “The Hundredth Queen” series, The Warrior Queen reunites most of the characters from the previous three books for one last mêlée full of action, sacrifice, and the supernatural. As with the previous books, King’s main characters narrate portions of the story which ensures the reader is able to discern what is happening in various places concurrently in this complicated finale. King, however, did alter her pattern by providing Prince Ashwin significant space in which to tell his side of the story, something which is a welcome addition to Kalindra’s and Deven’s narratives.

Prince Ashwin is trying to rebuild his city and establish a reign of peace where bhutas can live openly amongst the rest of the populace. But, there are dark forces working to undermine his efforts. Kalindra, on the other hand, undertakes a perilous journey which includes a god, demons, and a fight with her own soul in an effort to rescue Deven who is still trapped in the Void. Deven’s sole focus is survival in the Void that is stealing his memory, his will, and his very life.

The Warrior Queen is King’s most complex plot. In her previous books, the characters provided their perspectives of the same series of events. In this tale, three very different narratives are told; overlapping at the beginning and converging at the end. For most of the novel readers must follow the labyrinth with new characters, content, and relationships to reach the inevitable conclusion. This tangle can be frustrating for readers because King includes a lot of additional information that establishes tertiary plots that have very little to do with the primary plot. In fact, I found many of these incidental plots frustrating as they muddied the stories of previous books in the series or they appeared to be hinting at things that never materialized.

For example, The Warrior Queen begins with a prologue about a young boy being told a story by his mother. Later, readers can infer that the child in the prologue was Prince Ashwin. This story holds the seeds of how Kalindra can rescue Deven. The story, however, is told by a loving and committed mother who turns out to be the malicious rani, Lakia, someone Kalindra killed in the first novel. As the novel progresses, it is apparent that Ashwin feels abandoned by his mother and father and has a love-hate relationship with each of them. Kalindra meets Lakia again while travelling through the different levels of the Void. There, Lakia suffers in eternal torment as judgement for how she lived her life on earth. Lakia, however, cries to Kalindra that she never wanted to send Ashwin away and that Tarik kept her away refusing to allow her to say good-bye. This vignette does nothing to advance the central storyline – or any storyline. It does provide the reader with greater context of an already dead villain, but it caused me to wonder why this abused wife had to suffer eternal torment for trying to survive in a culture of repression that systemically pitted women against women for the affection of a man.

The readers who enjoyed the friendship and relationships in the earlier books in “The Hundredth Queen” series will appreciate the happy endings King provided. King excels at developing vibrant settings, and The Warrior Queen has kernels that are intriguing, but these moments are lost in the plethora of action and angst.